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Are Electric Cars better for the environment?

Swiss LibertarianJul 20, 2021, 3:16:14 AM
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In response to this video, which hypes electric vehicles:

The author's claim about being "neutral" is simply not true (starting with the cover picture!). He obviously has a massive bias. Having studied physics and having followed "green" energy claims very closely, I know that he omits lots and lots of essential information.

Problems minimized or ignored in the video

The list of problems with EVs is enormous:

  • batteries, especially lithium-based batteries, represent a substantial risk; they can combust spontaneously and even explode; recently, EV busses in China burned down an entire bus depot, which caused serious concern among western cities that use EV buses; lithium fires are almost impossible to extinguish; they can burn for 24 hours or more
  • one guy who had just purchased a brand new EV luxury sports car saw it gow up in flames; as more and more people buy EVs, this is a major risk fire departments now have to look into
  • it's actually related to the problem with solar panels when they catch fire; both are very hard to put out and very toxic
  • EV batteries as well as solar panels are extremely hard to recycle
  • there's a lot of energy lost in the transport of electricity and during the loading process, which you obviously did not account for; in the video, only the energy that ends up as battery charge was counted
  • batteries lose power over time when they are unused; depending on the battery technology, that can be very little or quite substantial, i.e. if you don't use an EV for 1 month after loading the battery to the max, it might lose a significant amount of energy, while a gas tank in a modern car has almost no leakage.
  • typical EV batteries have a life span of at most 7 years; coming technologies might expand that, but that's speculative; given that the batteries are the most expensive part of a typical lower- to middle-class EV, it is not worth replacing the battery, as the cost will exceed the depreciated value of the car itself, so you basically trash the entire car when the batterie dies; so even if the average age for batteries should reach 10 years, that's way lower than the time you can drive a gasoline car; my BMW now is 14 years old and in top shape; accounting for the reduced lifetime of EVs will substantially alter their eco profile.
  • the problem with the range is a huge issue; when you go on a long road trip, you don't want to have to stop every 200 to 250 km for 1 - 2 hours just to re-charge the batteries; a gasoline car can do 700 - 850 km on one tank and it takes less than 5 minutes to fill the tank, a huge advantage
  • if the number of EVs increases, the load on the electric network massively increases; contrary to the claim in the video, electric grids would be in total overload if even just 25% of all vehicles were EVs; the more there are, the more often they need to be charged at any given time of day, i.e. you can't tell people to "charge your cars at night"; professionals need their vehicles to be charged immediately, so they need extremely fast loading, provided new battery technology allows it; that also increases the energy loss and pulls enormously more current; as a rule of thumb, the average electric grid will need 6 to 7 times more power to support fast loading for a 100% EV fleet
  • current batteries require rare earths and are highly toxic in production as well as hard to recycle; CO2 is NOT the measure of the real eco-impact of EVs...
  • where will we get all that electric energy? We would have to replace about 40 to 60% of our total energy use that is currently provided by carbon-based fuels; we will not get it from wind or solar, which are both very low-density and unreliable, chaotic energy

The power generation challenge

Here is the exact composition of electric energy production for Germany, which claims to be "exemplary" in it's massive use of wind & solar:

https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE&interval=month

Note how Germany relies on a constant base production provided by hydro, nuclear, biomass and a slightly more variable coal production? Wind and solar are totally chaotic and have to be buffered by coal and gas power. The communist "green" activists want to completely remove nuclear, coal and gas - how do they expect to do that?

Average wind production only reaches a total 14.8% of the nominal installed capacity. I guess the "greens" calculate wind energy production based on the assumption that all turbines will permanently supply 100% of their nominal capacity.

Worst case scenario: cold, windless winter nights when wind & solar drop to 0.1% of their nominal capacity, which means that 99.9% of the wind & solar energy must be supplied from other sources precisely when there is a huge demand! In other words, the entire energy production infrastructure must be doubled!

The only way one could generate enough reliable energy to support a 100% EV fleet with fast charging would be nuclear, but the same people who push the not so "green" wind & solar do not want nuclear; because their profits stem from wind & solar, which are incapable of providing enough energy, so this is a trap.

I'm not at all against Electric Vehicles

I would start supporting EVs for general use:

  • when we use modern 4th & 5th generation nuclear power plants, maybe Torium-based, with liquid-salt cooling and subcritical, small reactors
  • alternatively if we manage to develop fusion power; then we can totally drop that solar & wind nonsense as complately pointless
  • when battery technology is so advanced that we have at least 5x the capacity, 10x the loading speed and none of the safety, resource and recycling issues

Stop using CO2 and climate alarmism to push EVs

The entire discourse that tries to tie EVs to CO2 emissions is absurd; CO2 has virtually ZERO impact on the climate.

It's physically impossible for humanity to impact the climate other than locally or over a very short period of time. We simply don't have enough energy to do so:

Professor Richard Muller, co-founder of Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature: "Looking at the data, I can see no evidence of human influence"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Moum_SZ5NNY&feature=youtu.be

The only measurable change through the minimal increase of CO2 over the last 100 years has been a GREENING of the planet!

Their models are completely wrong; they diverge by more than the 2-3 times the total claimed global warming between them; not a single model predicted the lack of warming from 1998 to 2015 - and given the NASA/NOAA data manipulation in 2015, there's a lot of doubt about the quality of data used; that means that no one has a clue about how the climate works and clearly, the assumption that CO2 causes major warming has proven incorrect. All the models that are based on that assumption produce totally absurd nonsense.

Texas relied for more than 20% of their energy production on wind energy, based on the alarmist claims about "climate change" - the models predicted that Texas would see only hot weather and drought. Instead, they just experienced an extrmele cold and snow-rich winter which froze their wind turbines, leaving thousands of households without energy.

The study "The scientific challenge of understanding and estimating climate change" contains essential information that they try to downplay:

"models differ among themselves in their estimates of surface temperature by an amount that is 2 to 3 times as large as the observed warming"

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/49/24390

The latest flooding in Europe is used as proof that something is "wrong" with the climate, that it is "changing". As always, they lie - we are totally within the normal climate variability. People just don't look at the history of climate events:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36443329

  • Major storms are DOWN; the worst storms in modern history (since 1500) almost all occurred before 1800.
  • Deadly climate events are DOWN; during the 1920s, close to 30 million people died due to climate events; we are down to just about 1 million per decade.
  • Food production is massively up, on less land! The number of people starving has been reduced to a fraction of what it used to be, in both, percentage and absolute numbers, despite a massively increased world population.

I wonder where all the "suffering people" Greta keeps talking about, given that living conditions continuously improved, worldwide. If you compare the average person in Africa with an average person in a western country, you might think that they are very poor, but if you compare that African person with their ancestors in the same country 50 years ago, their lives have improved immensely.

There's really ZERO correlation between CO2 and the climate; those who push the climate agenda have been lying for at least 60 years. It's all Club of Rome Marxist propaganda. They first tried scaremongering with "global cooling" (UN, NASA, NOAA, Royal Society, Nature, Science, NYT, Guardian, National Geographic etc. all participated), then they suddenly switched the entire discourse by 180 degrees and it became "global warming".

Every 10 years, they reset the date when the world will end. I've seen it for more than 5 decades and the world never ends; we just get the occasional upsetting climate event, which repeats every 20 - 30 years. Go check out the floodings of the past.

Why did humanity invent more than 3000 gods? Mostly to pray for clement weather, not to hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry, no earthquakes and no volcanic eruptions, because those were the kinds of events that happened all the time and could really mess up an entire population.

Sudden climate change is the norm

If anyone thought that sudden "climate change" is man-made, they did not spend one second looking at climate history.

Conclusion

Buying an EV because you think that it will "save the climate" is one of the biggest delusions, ever.

EVs are probably the future - but before they can truly replace our absolutely fantastic, highly optimized gasoline cars, we need at least 50 years of additional research and development, which is not a problem. Our emissions do not alter the climate.

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